CRUEL BRITANNIA

Not because I’m a patriot. Not because I believe in any idea as small and insular as a flag, or a nation. I love Britain for many reasons. But not because I was born here. To love somewhere because it’s where you were when your mother gave birth is as meaningless, and as random, as being proud of the colour of your eyes or your hair.

Shall we then, divide the world up into several continents. Shall we make a continent full of brunettes. One of blondes? One of redheads? Shall we then divide these continents further? So that for example, the Browneyes and Ol’ Blue Eyes fight against each other for the control of the Brunette Continent?

That’s how absurd the concept of national identity, national pride is. We subdivide the human race into tribes, we weaken ourselves and fight amongst themselves. Mankind is an underachiever : we could conquer space, change consciousness, and master the universe. Now, that sounds naïve. But it is possible. It just seems a remarkably distant concept as mankind fights and bickers amongst itself.

Nationalism is an absurd and frankly ridiculous concept. In the global perspective, there is only one race : the human race. There is only one kind of people : mankind. There is only one nation : civilisation. To divide the global village into factions to compete and fight against each other is the kind of shortsighted stupidity that will, ultimately, cripple the potential of the whole of humanity.

Has anyone ever heard the phrase “the whole is more than the sum of the parts”? Or its converse, “you get fuck all done unless we all work together”?

Not that it matters. I love Britain for a variety of reasons. I love the architecture. I love the fact that our buildings look grey and dull, and yet, in their way they look beautiful. There’s no building more beautiful, to me, than the hollowed out, derelict shell of Battersea Power Station. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is an art installation unmatched by anything else in the world.

I love the fact that I live in a block of flats that look like they came from a Land Time Forgot. Or the very least, from a 50’s disaster movie where they might be used as a vision of the beautiful future about to be destroyed by atomically mutated ants and a young Joan Collins runs around wearing a skimpy grey top. Though I do find it difficult to believe that these flats weren’t built in black and white and sometime in the fifties someone came round with a brush and painted it all brown and cream.

I love the culture. I love the fact that there’s a 24 hour garage just round the corner from mine : if you really do feel the urge to buy the NME and Cleaning Products at 3.37am. I love the weather : firstly there is some. Sometimes its cold, and other times warm. Sometimes it rains, and other times it doesn’t. I love the texture of grotty old run down pubs. The history of abandoned piers that crumble into the sea. I love the sadly-threatened Chip shop. And the cat that lives in one of the flats downstairs and – almost imperceptibly – nods when I come back from work in a gesture of feline recognition.

I love the character of a nation that has history, and is made up out of a vast, enormous amount of disparate sections of society that all peacefully co-exist. Well mostly. There are those that have what can only be described, somewhat dramatically as The Fear. Those who seek conflict instead of co-operation, those that see with the eyes of hate and not the eyes of love, those who fear anyone who could possibly threaten their tiny, little, miniscule empires. The empires that consist of just a few small rooms, a car, and two children.

These are the empires worth defending : worth defending with the ugliest violence there is. Empires worth making ugly to keep beautiful.

COOL BRITANNIA

It’s obviously not called Great Britain because we’re a large nation. You could transport the whole of the UK brick by brick, rebuild it somewhere in the American Desert, and nobody would notice for several months until the UFO hunters go looking for Area 51.

And so, this land, with it’s mixture of the modern and the antique, is culturally rich. We have a history that spans thousand of years, and the consequent sense of perspective that a historical background provides. And, at the same time, we’ve got 24 hour garages, innercity titty bars, Dial-a-pizza (or Dial-a-kebab if you like) and lots of countryside.

And that’s not because I believe in Britain because I was born here. I think that within my personality, the UK is the nation that is most closely aligned to my spiritual temperament.

FEAR OF A CACK PLANET

Diversity is healthy. A multicultural society is, by its very definition, a rich one. Not a diluted one. Because I believe that we, mankind as a collective consciousness, tend to benefit from an accumulation of our strengths, and so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The more aspects, the more diverse choices that are added to this nation, the stronger and more diverse it becomes.

I know diversification is very much an Eighties concept in business, but diversification is, in culture, the cornerstone of civilisation and can only lead to good things. Tolerance. Breadth. And damn good Balti houses.

So I don’t understand just one thing. Just one thing I can’t get. Because it just doesn’t make sense. Why are people who are proud of Great Britain, who proclaim this country to be the best place in the world to live, scared of immigrants?

Can’t they understand why people might want to live here? Do they fear, in some way that the nation will become weaker? Diluted?

The thing that makes this nation weak is fear. Stupidity. And division. Look beyond your trenches, and see the big picture. These people are those who fear that the things that make Britain great are the things that they might lose. Such selfish and ignorant thinking is part of what makes Britain grate, not what makes Britain Great.

This nation is strong in many respects (not including the Prime Ministers moral abilities here). This nation has many many great things about it. In a nation where there are 60,000,000 people, I really don’t see what the problem is with letting a few extra people in.

Besides, the number of people who enter the country each day is around 300 : even the wildest extrapolation of these figures give us, the UK, some extra 100,000 people a year. It’s not that many.

But you should consider those who trumpet the problem of immigration as a major, crushing issue that controls and shapes all other things are those who truly have lost perspective. Immigrants have not come here to steal our jobs, to steal our women, to steal our nation. (And even if they have, they’ve come to redress the balance of years of colonialism where the British Empire stole their resources, their women, and their whole damned nation). Not that I agree with repatriation, but I understand it.

What these people have come here to do is to escape from the brutal repressive regimes in places like Iraq. I somehow doubt that the Home Office can convincingly present to anyone a rejected asylum application for an Iraqi claiming that they are not at risk there. Or anywhere in the Middle East at the moment.

What these people have come to do is to live a life worth living. And they’re prepared to do anything to do that. The jobs that the natives feel are below them, jobs such as running the Burger Bars, cleaning the toilets and the offices, all the things that spoilt Westerners see as below them. Remember the line in Fight Club?

Besides, if you’re going to be a country that wanders around like Muhammad Ali and proclaim that “I AM THE GREATEST!” you really should expect people to come here. Maybe then the tourist board is doing too good a job of advertising the country.

This is the bottom line. There are people who proclaim loudly that the UK is the best, the greatest nation in the world, that Britain truly is great, and seem surprised and offended when people want to join them. These people fear. They see with the eyes of hate : they fear that anyone who comes to this country may steal from their precious nation. They divide and destroy the potential of all mankind because they fear that perhaps somewhere there is a better, fairer world than this.

Britain is great. But what makes Britain great are not people like this. It’s tolerance, it’s compassion, understanding and above all, unity. There is only one race : the human race. It does not matter who wins it, just so long as we make it to the end.